Dana Goodyear: Working Blue

In “Avatar,” James Cameron’s forthcoming 3-D adventure movie (which I write about in the magazine this week), Zoë Saldana, on the left, plays Neytiri, a Na’vi princess living on a faraway moon called Pandora; Sam Worthington, on the right, is Jake Sully, a wheelchair-bound ex-marine who, through plot devices too complex to explain here, transmits his consciousness into a tall, blue, Na’vi-like “avatar” and spends time among Pandora’s native population.

These characters and dozens of others Pandoran creatures were created using sophisticated performance-capture techniques and computer programs; each digital-effects shot took between six and nine months to complete. (The PandoraPedia, a guide to the rich flora and fauna of the place, will, according to MarketSaw, be released alongside the Avatar video game later this fall.) Though Cameron wanted the characters, particularly Neytiri, to be sexy, he didn’t have to worry too much about the “uncanny valley”—a phenomenon where audiences recoil from images that come too close to reality without actually achieving it. (I experienced the uncanny valley, for instance, watching Robert Zemeckis’s “Beowulf.&#8221)

If anything, Cameron’s problem was that the digital technology could make the images too pristine, stripping out the texture we expect from film. To give the movie soul, he sought to preserve the imperfections such as diffusion, blur, and lens flare. In the image above, Neytiri and Jake’s avatar stand in front of a waterfall. The background is blown out and overexposed, a quiet but unmistakable exertion of the filmmaker’s human presence.

Dana Goodyear, a staff writer, was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker from 1999 to 2007, when she began writing full time for the magazine.